Ravenweb Blog

I've added Wonder Woman as one of the superheroes (along with Batman, Captain America, the Hulk, the Punisher, Spider-Man, Superman, and Wolverine) my Superhero Survey assesses and compares you against. Are you a fellow wielder of the Lasso of Truth?

Here's the official poster for Season 9 (lifted from the Scrubs Facebook page).

I've updated the look and feel of my Superhero survey . Take a look. I'll also soon be adding a few more questions and two more superheroes to score against.

I've recently been borrowing my wife's iPod so I can listen to music during the day at work. (I need to get my own player, but I'm a procrastinator.) While I was wary of some of the artists I might find on the player, I knew that my wife and I liked enough similar musicians (U2, Springsteen) that I'd have enough music I enjoyed to fill a workday. What I didn't expect was that I'd discover a new artist who I'd really liked and end up listening to her songs over and over again. I'd heard of Pink before -- and even remember thinking "Stupid Girl" was interesting and clever -- but I had no idea Pink had released so many powerful and inventive pop songs. Of the eight or ten songs on my wife's iPod, my favorites are "Don't Let Me Get Me" , "Sober" , and "Just Like a Pill" , but I'm eager to listen to her other stuff.

I previously reviewed Arthur Goldwag's Cults, Conspiracies, and Secret Societies here . While I didn't love the book, I sure think the author was dead on in his message and nailed it in his post today at BoingBoing where he refuted key assertions of the 9/11 Truth movement. Goldwag: Some thoughts about 9/11 Truth

Dr. Bob Sears is the author of The Vaccine Book , an excellent reference text focused on vaccination that provides a balanced view of the subject. While Dr. Sears is pro-vaccination and offers his reasons for that stance, he does recommend and provide an alternate vaccination schedule that differs from the CDC's formal recommendation. Apparently, though, some alternate options originally offered by Dr. Sears are no longer available, specifically splitting the MMR into three separate shots, spread out over a few years. Dr. Sears details this change and the options for parents in a new blog post. Separate Measles, Mumps, and Rubella Vaccines No Longer Available?  What Can Parents Do?

I've recently stumbled upon the Organic Consumers Association website , and I just love it. Just about everyday they link to articles from varied sources about food, climate and the environment, genetic engineering, Fair Trade, and other key topics. In their own words they are "an online and grassroots non-profit 501(c)3 public interest organization campaigning for health, justice, and sustainability." Below are two stories they featured today that I found interesting and that demonstrate the type and caliber of content to which they regularly link: Toxins Make Halloween Face Paints Scary - sourced from HealthDay Is organic food a consumer scam? * - sourced from Examiner.com   * This one deftly refutes some recent studies that claim that "Organic food is not nutritionally superior to conventional food."

I've previously mentioned the recent redesign of this blog . Through that process, I also spent some time looking at visitor metrics and usage. I did this first out of curiosity, to see what visitors to this blog were looking at and what they weren't. Beyond that, I also wanted to double back to the original goals of the blog and guage if the site was serving its intended purpose. Roughly stated, I conceived and maintain this blog for the following reasons: to comment about books and movies, for my friends and anyone interested to provide general commentary, for my friends and anyone interested  to stay connected better with my friends to write and generate content self-expression and indulgence Looking at the analytics from the last two years, I was struck by a few prominent leading indicators: Most of the visitors (81%) to this site come from search engines No big surprise here. I suspect this is the same with most blogs that have been on their feet for more than ...

Updated (30 October 2009):  ICANN Approves International Web Addresses ICANN Bringing the Languages of the World to the Global Internet Hebrew, Hindi, other scripts get Web address nod ## It's been talked about for years, but it looks like all the hurdles have been passed and we may see web addresses written in languages other than English as early as next year. This is very interesting and really cool, although I wonder about the implications for translating existing domains and for the many people without language packs on their machines. Will all addresses have an English base, so you get the specific domain name based on your regional language settings? Will organizations start migrating away from some of the country-specific domains, like .jp and .cn? Time will tell. One of the key issues to be taken up by ICANN's board at this week's gathering is whether to allow for the first time entire Internet addresses to be in scripts that are not based on Latin lette...

During today's Bills-Panthers football game on CBS, I noticed a number of Walmart spots highlighting "family" moments. Apparently, because you can save money at Walmart and buy more stuff, you're happier and consequently spend more time with your family. The commercials I saw featured family members happily and wholesomely playing video games. The spots I did not see were of Walmart's own employees engaging with their families, happy and living better on a Walmart salary. I also didn't see any commercials revealing the family moments of Walmart's legion of overseas outsourced labor. Maybe we'll see these spots during the holidays.

As part of my blog redesign, I wanted to add utility links beneath my posts to allow visitors to share content easily. I'm on different computers throughout the week and like to use services like del.icio.us to bookmark and send links back and forth, so I appreciate it when sites provide these convenience links beneath posts. After some research, I discovered AddThis , an awesome sharing tool that's easy to use and incorporate into websites and blogs. I'm interested in what others think, first of utility links in general beneath blog posts. Are these becoming standard? Do you expect or want these links beneath news articles and blog posts? Regarding AddThis, has anyone else used this tool or anything similar?

I'm in the process of updating the look and feel of this blog. It's not a drastic change, but things should look cleaner and tidier as I finish the update. Credit to Deluxe Templates for the "Slidely" template which I am customizing for use here. Let me know what you think.

I don't read his column regularly, but I was browsing through ESPN.COM over the weekend and came across this gem from Bill Simmons. I don't think you have to be a parent to appreciate this, but it might help. My wife and I were rolling on the floor laughing! Important note: Being a parent of young kids sucks. Don't let anyone tell you differently. About six months ago, I wanted to start a Twitter account of quotes my wife screamed in the heat of those my-kids-are-driving-me-crazy-moments such as these: "If you don't stop crying, I am going to stick you in the microwave!!!!" and "Fine, climb up the stairs again; I hope you fall down, I really do!" She wouldn't let me because she thought child services would arrest us. The truth is, every parent snaps from time to time. We can't help it. Our kids' job is to suck all forms of life from us, frighten us, embarrass us in public and prevent us from sleeping until they turn 4. We pretend it'...

As someone who believes that effects in our lives are often due to unknown causes that make things seem like chance or luck, this article about behavior affecting luck rang true. Be lucky - it's an easy skill to learn

Sometimes I think an author has a great idea but misses on the execution, and that's my read on Arthur Goldwag's Cults, Conspiracies, and Secret Societies: The Straight Scoop on Freemasons, The Illuminati, Skull and Bones, Black Helicopters, The New World Order, and many, many more . While the author covers a full range of cults and conspiracies, including all the bigs ones -- like the Freemasons, Area 51 and Roswell, the Lincoln and Kennedy assassinations, and the 9/11 Truth Movement -- his propensity to provide the information in encyclopedic, itemized entries, even though he states that this is not his intent, detracts from any larger narrative and interconnections he could otherwise explore. Bottom line: Interesting to peruse, especially for some of the esoteric entries, but also a missed opportunity to go deeper and tease out the sociological and cultural implications behind the desire and need to believe.

Snoop is a fascinating and readable exploration of what personal items reveal about an individual's personality. Everything from what's on your iPod playlist to how your office is organized to how you dress for interviews illuminate who you are and how you behave. The book emerged from serious academic study and experiments, but author Sam Gosling has massaged the material for a general audience. For the most part, he succeeds, and if you enjoy Malcolm Gladwell's books and Freakonomics , you'll probably like Snoop as well.

The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox is a sad, eloquent novel about Iris Lockhart, a young Scottish woman who learns suddenly that she's been granted the power of attorney for a family relation she never knew existed -- a great aunt (Esme Lennox) who has been in a mental institution for the past 60 years. With this solid nouveau-Gothic premise, the novel proceeds by switching back and forth in time and alternating narrative points of view, between Iris and Esme. The story of both women is thus gradually revealed, and the ending, whether or not the reader guesses at the big surprise, is dramatic and powerful.

Shop Class as Soulcraft explores the value of manual competence and the rewards of working in the trades versus working as a professional or knowedge worker. From this point of departure, author and motorcycle repair-shop owner Matthew B. Crawford tackles a number of thought-provoking and culturally immediate questions. For example, is there a general under-estimation and under-appeciation of the intellectual rigor and challenges in the manual trades? Are some of the manual trades immune to outsourcing and should they be worthy of new consideration for otherwise college-eligible grads in the evolving world of outsourcing? Is there deeper personal and communal satisfaction in standards that -- in the trades -- are inherent in the work itself compared to more abstract measures of competence in other professional fields? These are hard questions worthy of deep conversations and analysis. To that end, I'm very pleased that Crawford made the attempt. As for the execution, though,...

I previously posted about how to implement expandable posts in Blogger -- that is a summary lead-in on the main page (instead of the whole post) and a link to the the rest of the post on a separate page. Well, I guess enough people were interested in this functionality that Blogger decided to add it as a standard feature, called Jump Breaks : With Jump Breaks you can show just a snippet of your post on your blog's index page. Blogger will insert a "Read more" link to the full post page where your readers can keep reading. Check out the full post about Jump Breaks from the Blogger Buzz blog .

The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters is all about human waste, but it's not a gross out or uncouth book. Instead, this is a very interesting and accessible survey of the state of human waste disposal across the world, with analysis of some of the long-standing social and environmental challenges that are involved. One of the major points author Rose George emphasizes is that poor sanitation is a huge problem in many parts of the world. Simply, poor santiation leads to contaminated food and dirty drinking water that, in turns, leads to disease and the deaths of millions of people each year (many children, often from dysentery).